The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex, publ. The Women's Press, 1979. Just the first Chapter reproduced here.

Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as
a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few
reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the
labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and
child - 'That? Why you can't change that! You
must be out of your mind!' - is the closest to the truth. We
are talking about something every bit as deep as that. This gut
reaction - the assumption that, even when they don't know it,
feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological
condition - is an honest one. That so profound a change cannot
be easily fitted into traditional categories of thought, e.g.,
'political', is not because these categories do not apply but
because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through
them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution
- we would use it.

Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology
had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental
biological conditions was insanity. Why should a woman give up
her precious seat in the cattle car for a bloody struggle she
could not hope to win? But, for the first time in some countries,
the preconditions for feminist revolution exist - indeed, the
situation is beginning to demand such a revolution.

The first women are fleeing the massacre, and sharing and tottering,
are beginning to find each other. Their first move is a careful
joint observation, to resensitise a fractured consciousness. This
is painful: no matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches,
the problem always goes deeper. It is everywhere. The division
yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature
itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only
the most recent layer. To so heighten one's sensitivity to sexism
presents problems far worse than the black militant's new awareness
of racism: feminists have to question, not just all of Western
culture, but the organisation of culture itself, and further,
even the very organisation of nature. Many women give up in despair:
if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know. Others
continue strengthening and enlarging the movement, their painful
sensitivity to female oppression existing for a purpose: eventually
to eliminate it.

Before we can act to change a situation, however, we must know
how it has arisen and evolved, and through what institutions it
now operates. Engels's '[We must] examine the historic succession
of events from which the antagonism has sprung in order to discover
in the conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.'
For feminist revolution we shall need an analysis of the dynamics
of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class
antagonism was for the economic revolution. More comprehensive.
For we are dealing with a larger problem, with an oppression
that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.

In creating such an analysis we can learn a lot from Marx and
Engels: not their literal opinions about women - about the condition
of women as an oppressed class they know next to nothing, recognising
it only where it overlaps with economics but rather -their--analytic
method.

Marx and Engels outdid their socialist forerunners in that they
developed a method of analysis which was both dialectical
and materialist. The first in centuries to view history
dialectically, they saw the world as process, a natural flux of
action and reaction, of opposites yet inseparable and interpenetrating.
Because they were able to perceive history as movie rather than
as snapshot, they attempted to avoid falling into the stagnant
'metaphysical' view that had trapped so many other great minds.
(This sort of analysis itself may be a product of the sex division,
as discussed in Chapter 9.) They combined this view of the dynamic
interplay of historical forces with a materialist one, that is,
they attempted for the first time to put historical and cultural
change on a real basis, to trace the development of economic classes
to organic causes. By understanding thoroughly the mechanics
of history, they hoped to show men how to master it.

Socialist thinkers prior to Marx and Engels, such as Fourier,
Owen, and Bebel, had been able to do no more than moralise about
existing social inequalities, positing an ideal world where class
privilege and exploitation should not exist - in the same way
that early feminist thinkers posited a world where male privilege
and exploitation ought not exist - by mere virtue of good will.
In both cases, because the early thinkers did not really understand
how the social injustice had evolved, maintained itself, or could
be eliminated, their ideas existed in a cultural vacuum, utopian.
Marx and Engels, on the other hand, attempted . a scientific
approach to history, They traced the class conflict to its real
economic origins, projecting an economic solution based on objective
economic preconditions already present: the seizure by the proletariat
of the means of production would lead to a communism in which
government had withered away, no longer needed to repress the
lower class for the sake of the higher. In the classless society
the interests of every individual would be synonymous with those
of the larger society.

But the doctrine of historical materialism, much as it was a brilliant
advance over previous historical analysis, was not the complete
answer, as later events bore out. For though Marx and Engels
grounded their theory in reality, it was only a partial
reality. Here is Engels's strictly economic definition of historical
materialism from Socialism: Utopian or Scientific:

Historical materialism is that view of the course of history which
seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of
all historical events in the economic development of society,
in the changes of tile modes of production and exchange, in the
consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the
struggles of these classes against one another-. (Italics mine)

Further, he claims:

... that all past history with the exception of the primitive
stages was the history of class struggles; that these warring
classes of society are always the products of the modes of production
and exchange - in a word, of the economic conditions of their
time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes
the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the
ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical
and political institutions as well as of' the religious, philosophical,
and other ideas of a given historical period. (Italics mine)

It would be a mistake to attempt to explain the oppression of
women according to this strictly economic interpretation. 'The
class analysis is a beautiful piece of work, but limited: although
correct in a linear sense, it does not go deep enough. There
is a whole sexual substratum of the historical dialectic that
Engels at times dimly perceives, but because he can see sexuality
only through an economic filter, reducing everything to that,
he is unable to evaluate fit its own right.

Engels did observe that the original division of labour was between
man and woman for the purposes of child-breeding; that within
the family the husband was the owner, the wife the means of production,
the children the labour; and that reproduction of the human species
was an important economic system distinct from the means of production.

But Engels has been given too much credit for these scattered
recognitions of the oppression of women as a class. In fact he
acknowledged the sexual class system only where it overlapped
and illuminated his economic construct. Engels didn't do so well
even in this respect. But Marx was worse: there is a growing recognition
of -Marx's bias against women (a cultural bias shared by Freud
as well as all men of culture), dangerous if one attempts to squeeze
feminism into an orthodox Marxist framework - freezing what were
only incidental insights of' Marx and Engels about sex class into
dogma. Instead, we must enlarge historical materialism to include
the strictly Marxian, in the same way that the physics of
relativity did not invalidate Newtonian physics so much as it
drew a circle around it, limiting its application - but only through
comparison - to a smaller sphere. For an economic diagnosis traced
to ownership of the means of production, even of the means of
reproduction, does not explain everything. There is a level of
reality that does not stem directly from economics.

The assumption that, beneath economics, reality is psychosexual
is often rejected as ahistorical by those who accept a dialectical
materialist view of history because it seems to land us back where
Marx began: groping through a fog of utopian hypotheses, philosophical
systems that might be right, that might be wrong (there is no
way to tell); systems that explain concrete historical developments
by a priori categories of thought; historical materialism,
however, attempted to explain 'knowing' by 'being' and not vice
versa.

But there is still an untried third alternative: we can attempt
to develop a materialist view of history based on sex itself.

The early feminist theorists were to a materialist view of sex
what Fourier, Bebel, and Owen were to a materialist view of class.
By and large, feminist theory has been as inadequate as were
the early feminist attempts to correct sexism. This was to be
expected. The problem is so immense that, at first try, only
the surface could be skimmed, the most blatant inequalities described.
Simone de Beauvoir was the only one who came close to - who perhaps
has done - the definitive analysis. Her profound work The
Second Sex - which appeared as recently as the early fifties
to a world convinced that feminism was dead - for the first time
attempted to ground feminism in its historical base. Of all feminist
theorists De Beauvoir is the most comprehensive and far-reaching,
relating feminism to the best ideas in our culture.

It may be this virtue is also her one failing: she is almost too
sophisticated, too knowledgeable. Where this becomes a weakness
- and this is still certainly debatable - is in her rigidly existentialist
interpretation of feminism (one wonders how much Sartre had to
do with this). This, in view of the fact that all cultural systems,
including existentialism, are themselves determined by the sex
dualism. She says:

Man never thinks of himself without thinking of the Other; he
views the world under the sign of duality which is not in the
first placesexual in character. But being different
from man, who sets himself up as the Same, it is naturally to
the category. of the Other that woman is consigned; the Other
includes woman. (Italics mine.)

Perhaps she has overshot her mark: Why postulate a fundamental
Hegelian concept of Otherness as the final explanation and then
carefully document the biological and historical circumstances
that have pushed the class 'women' into such a category - when
one has never seriously considered the much simpler and more likely
possibility that this fundamental dualism sprang from the sexual
division itself ? To posit a priori categories of thought
and existence - 'Otherness', 'Transcendence 'Immanence' - into
which history then falls may not be necessary. Marx and Engels
had discovered that these philosophical categories themselves
grew out of history.

Before assuming such categories, let us first try to develop an
analysis in which biology itself - procreation - is at the origin
of the dualism. The immediate assumption of the layman that the
unequal division of the sexes is 'natural' may be well-founded.
We need not immediately look beyond this. Unlike economic class
sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women
were created different, and not equal. Although, as De Beauvoir
points out, this difference of itself did not necessitate the
development of a class system - the domination of one group by
another - the reproductive functions of these differences
did. The biological family is an inherently unequal power distribution.
The need for power leading to the development of classes arises
from the psychosexual formation of each individual according to
this basic imbalance, rather than, as Freud, Norman O. Brown,
and others have, once again-over-shooting their mark, postulated,
some irreducible conflict of Life against Death, Eros vs.
Thanatos.

The biological family - the basic reproductive unit of
male/female/infant, in whatever form of social organisation -
is characterised by these fundamental - if not immutable - facts:

(1) That Women throughout history before the. advent of birth
control were at the continual mercy of their biology - menstruation,
menopause, and 'female ills', constant painful childbirth, wet-nursing
and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males
(whether brother, father, husband, lover, or clan, government,
community-at-large) for physical survival.

(2) That human infants take an even longer time to grow up than
animals, and thus are helpless and, for some short period at least,
dependent on adults for physical survival.

(3) That a basic mother/child interdependency has existed in thus
has shaped some form in every society, past or present, and the
psychology of every mature female and every infant.

(4) That the natural reproductive difference between the sexes
led directly to the first division of labour at the origins of
class, as well as furnishing the paradigm of caste (discrimination
based on biological characteristics).

These biological contingencies of the human family cannot be covered
over with anthropological sophistries. one and caring. for their
observing animals mating, reproducing young will have a hard time
accepting the 'cultural relativity' line. For no matter how many
tribes in Oceania you can find where the connection of the. father
to fertility is not known, no matter . how many matrilineages,
no matter how many cases o sex-role reversal, male housewifery,
or even empathic labour pains, these facts prove only one thing:
the amazing flexibility of human nature. But human nature
is adaptable to something, it is, yes, determined by its environmental
conditions. And the biological family that we have described
has existed everywhere throughout time. Even in matriarchies where
woman's fertility is worshipped, and the father's role is unknown
or unimportant, if perhaps not on the genetic father, there is
still some dependence of the female and the infant on the male.
And though it is true that the nuclear family is only a recent
development, one which, as I shall attempt to show, only intensifies
the psychological penalties of the biological family, though it
is true that throughout history there have been many variations
on this biological family, the contingencies I have described
existed in dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production,
all of them, causing specific psychosexual distortions in the
human personality.

But to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically
based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals.
And the kingdom of nature does not reign absolute. As Simone
de Beauvoir herself admits:

The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some
important truths. Humanity is not an animal species, it is a
historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis - in a sense
it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence
of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own
behalf. This arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation;
it is accomplished objectively in practical action.

Thus the 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value. Humanity
has begun to transcend Nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance
of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins
in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning
to look as if we must get rid of it (see Chapter 10).

The problem becomes political, demanding more than a comprehensive
historical analysis, when one realises that, though man is increasingly
capable of freeing himself from the biological conditions that
created his tyranny over women and children, he has little reason
to want to give this tyranny up. As Engels said, in the context
of economic revolution:

It is the law of division of labour that lies at the basis of
the division into classes. [Note that this division itself grew
out of a fundamental biological division.] But this does not prevent
the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating
its power at the expense of the working class, from turning its
social leadership into an intensified exploitation of the masses.

Though the sex class system may have originated in fundamental
biological conditions, this does not guarantee once the biological
basis of their oppression has been swept away that women and children
will be freed. On the contrary, the new technology, especially
fertility control, maybe used against them to reinforce the entrenched
system of exploitation.

So that just as. to assure elimination of economic classes requires
the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a -temporary
dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production,
so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt
of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction:
not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their
own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human
fertility - the new population biology as well as all the social
institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing. And just as
the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination
of the economic class privilege but of the economic class
distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution
must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just
the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction
itself: genital differences between human beings would no
longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality
Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede
hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by
one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least
the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to
both sexes equally, or independently of. either, however one chooses
to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and
vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on
a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority
to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally.
The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of
labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological
family would be broken.

And with it the psychology of power. As Engels claimed for strictly
socialist revolution: 'The existence of not simply this or that
ruling class but of any ruling class at all [will have] become
an obsolete anachronism.' That socialism has never come near achieving
this predicated goal is not only the result of unfulfilled or
misfired economic preconditions, but also because the Marxian
analysis itself was insufficient: it did not dig deep enough to
the psychosexual roots of class. Marx was on to something more
profound than he knew when he observed that the family contained
within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop
on a wide scale within the society and the state. For unless
revolution uproots the basic social organisation, the biological
family - the vinculum through which the psychology of power
can always be smuggled - the tapeworm of exploitation will never
be annihilated. We shall need a sexual revolution much larger
than - inclusive of - a socialist one to truly eradicate all class
systems.

I have attempted to take the class analysis one step further
to its roots in the biological division of the sexes. We have
not thrown out the insights of the socialists; on the contrary,
radical feminism can enlarge their analysis, granting it an even
deeper basis in objective conditions and thereby explaining many
of its insolubles. As a first step in this direction, and as
the ground work for our own analysis we shall expand Engels's
definition of historical materialism. Here is the same definition
quoted above now rephrased to include the biological division
of the sexes for the purpose of reproduction, which lies at the
origins of class:

Historical materialism, is that view of the course of history
which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all
historic events in the dialectic of sex: the division of society
into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction,
and the struggles of these classes with one another; in the changes
in the modes of marriage, reproduction and child care created
by these struggles; in the connected development of other physically-differentiated
classes [castes]; and in the first division of labour based on
sex which developed into the [economic-cultural] class system.

And here is the cultural superstructure, as well as the economic
one, traced not just back to economic class, but all the way back
to sex:

All past history [note that we can now eliminate 'with the exception
of primitive stages'] was the history of class struggle. These
warring classes of society are always the product of the modes
of organisation of the biological family unit for reproduction
of the species, as well as of the strictly economic modes of
production and exchange of goods and services. The sexual-reproductive
organisation of society always furnishes the real basis, starting
from which we can alone Work out the ultimate explanation of the
whole superstructure of economic, juridical and political institutions
as well as of the religious, philosophical and other ideas of
a given historical period.

And now Engels's projection of the results of a materialist approach
to history is more realistic:

The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man
and have hitherto ruled him now comes under the dominion and control
of man who for the first time becomes the real conscious Lord
of Nature, master of his own social organisation.

In the following chapters we shall assume this definition of
historical materialism, examining the cultural institutions
that maintain and reinforce the biological family (especially
its present manifestation, the nuclear family) and its result,
the psychology of power, and aggressive chauvinism now developed
enough to destroy us. We shall integrate this with a feminist
analysis of Freudianism: for Freud's cultural bias, like that
of Marx and Engels, does not invalidate his perception entirely.
In fact, Freud had insights of even greater value than those
of the socialist theorists for the building of a new dialectical
materialism based on sex. We shall attempt, then, to correlate
the best of Engels and Marx (the historical materialist approach)
with the best of Freud (the understanding of inner man and women
and what shapes them) to arrive at a solution both political and
personal yet grounded in real conditions. We shall see that Freud
observed the dynamics of psychology correctly in its immediate
social context, but because the fundamental structure of that
social context was basic to all humanity - to different degrees
- it appeared to be nothing less than an absolute existential
condition which it would be insane to question - forcing Freud
and many of his followers to postulate a priori constructs
like the Death Wish to explain the origins of these universal
psychological drives. This in turn made the sicknesses of humanity
irreducible and incurable - which is why his pro posed solution
(psychoanalytic therapy), a contradiction in terms, was so weak
compared to the rest of his work, and such a resounding failure
in practice - causing those of social/political sensibility to
reject not only his therapeutic solution, but his most profound
discoveries as well.